Inside the Archive - David Summerfield

I met Norman first time on a project called North Greenwich Transport Interchange, and there was a very nice little, quite small project in Greenwich. I met him in design reviews and on site, we walked around on site, et cetera. In Hong Kong, it was about 80 people, and it was an overseas office, so a big open space high up in a tower overlooking Victoria Harbour. A lot of hard work but very much concentrated on one project: Chek Lap Kok Airport. Coming back to London, a very different environment; it was sort of production of information. This was all about design. So when I turned up here, there were 80 people in this studio, a lot fewer than there are now, and there were two computers at the end — two big huge computers — and everyone was drawing on mainline on these amazing tables, you used to draw stuff and then we used to put it in the computers. So now we still sketch and we make sketch models, etc., but there's a lot of digital work that goes on. I think Crossrail is a lovely project in that we were commissioned to make — how do you finish the top of the station of the railway box that's Crossrail in Canary Wharf? We created this urban park with a restaurant at either end, and then it needed an identity and some protection from the weather, etc. So the roof on Crossrail is this amazing boat-like structure which has ETFE panels within it, environmentally friendly, and a lot of engineering went on within the studio to try and make each piece of timber the same. At the beginning it was a complex shape, it swoops up and curves at the end, and those pieces of timber were all different. So making them the same allowed it to be built and to be economic. On a much smaller project where there was an existing derelict building, we were asked to extend that and create an amphitheater for the ice skating rink, using a company called Blumer Lehmann in Austria that we cut the timber and developed it so that we could make these rather beautiful, small but elegant structures that then made the stadium there. Starting with Apple Campus, the headquarters building: the way that is put together in technological terms, it's almost like Lego. You build everything over here, then pull it to site and put it together, so it's all prefabricated. The floors, the ceiling, the structure is prefabricated. It allows you to build it two or three years in advance, stockpile it over here, and then bring it on trucks to site and erect it. It made the building much quicker, more robust, and accurate. What this means is it allows the environment to be much more healthy. Once you naturally ventilate, you don't force air like air conditioning — you don't force air into it, you just allow the air to drop with cool and move through the building and up out of the building. That's monitored every day and every hour, so people inside the building never feel like there's an open window, they don't actually know it's natural ventilation, and it just makes a nicer, happier place to be. I think the world is going to change massively. I think with embodied carbon and greenhouse gases, the whole mobility and car infrastructure in cities is going to change. Obviously electric vehicles will be a part of that. So I think the future of mobility is that people will want to travel. So going forward, I'd like to believe we can keep that scale going, the diversity in scale — we can do boats, buildings, and whatever it leads onto, which can be really interesting, exciting mobility. I think the skill that we have here is we're not just architects: we have engineers, mathematicians, scientists. Putting all that together, it's like this fantastic playground where we can put all the tools together and try to work our way forward, not just for new cities but for existing cities.